Shadows Still Remain. Peter Jonge De

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      Detective Darlene O’Hara licks the cranberry sauce off her thumb and savors the penultimate bite of her homemade turkey sandwich. She is enjoying her modest feast in the empty second-floor detective room of Manhattan’s Seventh Precinct, overlooking a windswept corridor of the Lower East Side where so much unsightly city infrastructure—including a highway, bridge ramps, dozens of housing projects and this squat brick station house—has been shoved against the East River. The Seven is the second-smallest precinct in the city, covering just over half a square mile, and the curiously exact address of the station is 19½ Pitt Street, but there’s nothing half-assed about the institutional bleakness in which O’Hara has chosen to spend a solitary Thanksgiving.

      O’Hara, who is thirty-four, with wavy red hair, raw, translucent Irish skin, that even in late November is sprinkled with freckles, provides the only color in the room. She sits at a beige metal desk facing a wall of beige metal file cabinets. The light is fluorescent and the linoleum floor filthy, and behind her, facing a TV that gets three channels badly, is a lunch table littered with the Chinese food tins and pizza boxes that couldn’t fit in the overflowing wastebasket. The windows are filthy too, darkening an already grimy view of the Bernard Baruch projects across the street, but the layer of dirt doesn’t seem to keep out the cold.

      O’Hara isn’t the slightest bit put out by her surroundings or solitude. In fact, she welcomes the rare quiet. It’s like getting paid to think, she thinks, and besides, she isn’t altogether lacking in company. In the chair next to her, curled up in the deep indentation excavated by her partner’s ample Armenian ass, is her fourteen-pound terrier mutt Bruno, his peaceful canine slumber punctuated by snorts and sighs and the occasional rogue fart.

      In addition to the overtime, O’Hara is working the shift for the distraction. Two p.m. in New York makes it 11:00 a.m. on the West Coast. In a couple of hours, Axl, her eighteen-year-old son and University of Washington freshman, will be heading to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue for his first visit to his girlfriend’s parents, and O’Hara pictures Axl, sprawled in his ratty chair in his ratty bathrobe, girding himself for five hours of hell (the father is a shrink, the mother a dermatologist) with black coffee and Metallica. As far as she can tell, a fondness for heavy metal is about the only attribute her son has acquired from her, not including of course his red hair and ridiculous name. In most significant ways, Axl takes after O’Hara’s mother, Eileen. This is probably a good thing and, once you’ve done the math, not surprising, since his grandmother is the person who essentially raised him. You don’t survive having a kid your junior year of high school without a great deal of help, and as O’Hara polishes off her sandwich she makes a point of silently expressing the thankfulness appropriate to both her circumstances and the holiday. Still, the thought of Axl spending Thanksgiving at a dining room table in a real house with a real family makes O’Hara feel like crap.

      The first two-thirds of O’Hara’s shift go as quietly as expected. She reads the Post and News and half the Times. At 3:15, she gets a call from Paul Morelli, the desk sergeant on duty. A rookie patrolman, named Chamberlain, just brought in a Marwan Overton, nineteen, on a sexual assault. Should he bring him upstairs?

      “It’s Thanksgiving, for Chrissakes,” says O’Hara. “It’s supposed to be a PG holiday—turkey, a bad football game, family.”

      “Well, who do you think filed the complaint?”

      “Martha Stewart.”

      “Close,” says Morelli. “Althea Overton, who in addition to being a junkie, prostitute and a thief, is also the suspect’s mom.”

      “Well, OK then.”

      Minutes later, Chamberlain escorts the handcuffed Overton into the detective room. After O’Hara takes the suspect from him, Chamberlain lingers awkwardly by the door, like someone at the end of a date hoping to be invited in.

      “I heard you actually volunteered to work the shift,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

      Although O’Hara wears no makeup, rubber-soled shoes, and cuts her own hair, and obscures her generous curves under loose-fitting pantsuits and button-down shirts, she’s not fooling anyone. Half the guys in the Seven have a crush on her and the young ones like Chamberlain, tend to get goofy and tongue-tied when they talk to her.

      “Hopefully, СКАЧАТЬ